Daring To Disturb

Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
November 14, 2004

Reading 1:
from the Hebrew Scriptures, Numbers 11:26-30

Two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other named Medad and the spirit rested on them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp." And Joshua, son of Nun, the assistant to Moses, one of his chosen men, said, “My Lord, Moses, stop them!” But Moses said to him, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”

Reading 2:
from TS Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Reading 3:
from Teaching To Transgress, by bell hooks

In the last twenty years I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create an unfree world. In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go forward if we did not experience a “true revolution of values.” He assured us that

"the stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy."

Today, we live in the midst of that floundering. We live in chaos, uncertain about the possibility of building and sustaining community. The public figures who speak the most to us about a return to old-fashioned values embody the evils King describes. They are most committed to maintaining systems of domination—racism, sexism, class exploitation, and imperialism. They promote a perverse vision of freedom that makes it synonymous with materialism. They teach us to believe that domination is “natural,” that it is right for the strong to rule over the weak, the powerful over the powerless. What amazes me is that so many people claim not to embrace these values and yet our collective rejection of them cannot be complete since they prevail in our daily lives.

Sermon:

I hate mosquitoes! I hate lying in bed and then hearing the high-pitched sound of one scoping out a patch of my skin in which to plunge its proboscis. My wife thinks I am overly sensitive. She can tell you that if I suspect mosquitoes may be hiding out as I head to bed, I will do all I can to rid the room of them, to prevent them from vexing me through the night.

Mosquitoes of the spirit, on the other hand, are not so easy to banish from one’s sleep, and nor should one necessarily try to do so. Many mosquitoes of the spirit come in the service of health and wholeness, for they are pieces of truth seeking embodiment within human relations, pieces of truth that, until acknowledged and embraced, will come in the form of disturbance.

When I was young, an image from the television news lodged deep within my psyche. Several elder Argentine women, in their traditional garb, stood on a corner outside their government buildings. These women bore quiet witness to the horrors of living under oppressive tyranny, for each of them had lost a son or a daughter or a sister or a brother to the brutal military tactics of torturing and killing those who fostered dissent. Human rights organizations believe 30,000 people “disappeared” during the 1970s in Argentina. Several years ago, I learned that this disturbing image also haunted Lawrence Thornton, a writer of novels and the husband of a mentor of mine in college. It disturbed him so much that he wrote a novel called Imagining Argentina. He felt compelled to do all sorts of research about people who disappeared, those who sought justice, and those who committed the horrific violence. He did everything short of actually visiting Argentina. His novel won several awards and many Argentines are thankful to him for putting into words the pain, the confusion, the outrage, and the helplessness of those women who dared to call the world’s attention to that savage regime.

Madeleine L’Engle, in an address to the Library of Congress, entitled "Dare to Be Creative", speaks of the capacity that all of us have not only to be disturbed by injustice but also to disturb others. She says, “The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians—because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people. [Education] open[s] our eyes to injustices which make us uncomfortable; if we don’t know about them, we don’t have to do anything about them. Perhaps people who read and write and have enough vocabulary to think with are universe disturbers. But we need to disturb the universe if, as human beings on planet earth, we are to survive. We need to have the vocabulary to question ourselves, and enough courage to disturb creatively, rather than destructively, even if it is going to make us uncomfortable or even hurt.”

Today, I want to acknowledge a face of God that is at the heart of our Unitarian Universalist tradition: God as gadfly. I haven’t heard others speak of God this way, but the more I reflect on the nature of conscience, the nature of community, and the nature of social change, there is no denying the spiritual significance of gadflies that seek to turn our attention to injustice, to needless suffering, to the ways we live that have hurtful consequences on others. Whether the gadfly is within our conscience or is a person demanding that an injustice be acknowledged, the disturbance created may very well be a manifestation of the divine in our life.

If we went back in history two hundred years and asked the young preacher named William Ellery Channing where God works in the world. He would answer that God manifests in human conscience calling us all to bring forth goodness, beauty, and justice in our world. He would tell us that human nature is basically good, because God is to found within the conscience of all humanity. In his words, “Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly [one’s own], and which no conscience but one’s own can teach.” Channing believed, “that all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of [humanity], that is, in conscience, or [one’s] sense of duty, and in the power of forming [one’s] temper and life according to conscience." William Ellery Channing became the grandfather of Unitarianism and he was a prophet, albeit a reluctant one in his time.

In the Biblical tradition, the Hebrew prophets are the prototypes for people with moral conviction who speak truth to power. They seek to disturb. They seek to make their words lodge within human conscience. Their teachings appeared more like ravings, and those of the ruling elite naturally wanted to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye. But this only upped the amplitude of the prophets raving and embodying what I call a theology of disturbance.

The exhortations of the prophets of old are as relevant today as then. From Amos, chapter eight:

Hear this, you who trample upon the needy,
And bring the poor of the land to an end,
Saying: when will the new moon be over that we may sell grain?
And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale,
that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great,
and deal deceitfully with false balances,
that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals
and sell the refuse of the wheat?

From the second chapter of Habakkuk:

Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own,
woe to him who gets evil gain for his house,
for the stone cries out from the wall
and the beam from he woodwork responds.
Woe to him who builds a town with blood,
and founds a city on iniquity.

Whether in the days of old or in the 21^st century, I discern three essential qualities that make a prophet. First, a prophet comes out of a particular culture and grapples with its social norms. Second, social injustice and the resulting suffering and sorrow compels the prophet to distinguish the values that are life-giving and those that are life-denying; and Third, the prophet calls upon all who buy into and reinforce the status quo to change their ways so as to alleviate human sorrow and suffering.

Abraham Heschel says in his book, The Prophets, “Prophecy is the voice that God has lent the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and [humanity]. God is raging in the prophet’s words. … Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. … The prophet disdains those for whom God’s presence is comfort and security; to him it is a challenge, an incessant demand. God is compassion, not compromise; justice, though not inclemency. … The prophet’s word is a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven."

It is important to remember that the prophets were human beings, like us. Like Jonah, they don’t want to speak truth to power, but they are compelled to. Their ears are attuned to a cry imperceptible to others. Nuanced truth that smacks of injustice vex them. They live out of a theology of disturbance. The disturbance is so great that one cannot but follow one’s conscience no matter how others may respond.

J. Alfred Prufrock is a good example of an anti-prophet. He lives in a world that is sick—where yellow smoke slides along the street and where folks seek to please or impress—by creating a face to meet the other faces that you meet. Prufrock feels the tug of conscience, wondering, “Do I dare? Do I dare?” but he gets distracted by the women who come and go speaking of Michelangelo. When faced with an ultimate question, he is immersed in uncertainty, knowing his indecisions and revision can in a minute be reversed. The mantra at the beginning of the poem is seductive:  There will be time, there will be time. Time for what? Time to murder and create, and then later time to wonder, Do I dare?

TS Eliot calls this fabulous little poem "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock". Why a love song? Could it be the cry of the heart to find deeper meaning than a life of indecision? a life that does little more than put on a face to meet the faces that you meet? This love song of a whimsical balding man is a meditation on that question that crops up: Do I dare? Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe?

There is an element of risk in daring to be real. To dare to pursue a dream means giving up the security that is at odds with achieving that dream. To dare to disturb may result in the loss of certain friendships or changing one’s life pattern. The security might be financial, it might be emotional, it might be political. The question many may ask, “Do I dare put my security into jeopardy?” But for the prophet, indeed for all people of faith, the more important question is “Dare I not follow the hope in my soul, the convictions of my conscience, the calling in my gut?”

This past week and a half, I have heard time and again that our nation is in need for a clarification of values. Actually, we need what Martin Luther King Jr. calls a revolution of values. We must, as the prophet says, shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.

Where are the prophets of today? Are they among us? Does our collective media prevent them a voice? Are Americans in mass recoiling from the disturbances that lodge in or emerge from within our souls? Those that speak truth to power have always been ignored, shunned, and despised by many. Is it any more so today? I fear our culture is awash in spiritual mosquito repellant, and perhaps drowning in it. Our culture is saturated with religious literature ranging from fundamentalist scare tactics to new age illusions of total tranquility, most of which turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to authentic voices of poverty and struggle.

One prophetic voice is that of bell hooks, a prolific writer and a professor of education and black feminist studies. Two years ago she was asked to give the commencement speech at Southwestern University, a liberal arts school in Georgetown, Texas, where she had been a visiting professor. She didn’t give a tepid, feel good speech so common for the occasion. Instead she dared to disturb. She acknowledged that some students indulge “in the basic violence of self-betrayal – going along to get along, going along with the crowd, conforming.” She talked about government sponsored violence, oppression, and death in which she criticized, “every imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal nation on the planet” for teaching citizens “to care more for tomorrow than today.” And she advised the crowd to treasure their relationships, to build community, and to “critically review” their college years with the hopeful intention “to realize the essential goodness of your being.” The audience booed her. Newspaper articles and letters slandered her. But she left knowing she spoke the truth as it has been revealed to her through experience and reason.

As Madeleine L’Engle says, education opens “our eyes to injustices which make us uncomfortable; if we don’t know about them, we don’t have to do anything about them.” It is a part of the liberal religious agenda to open ourselves to truth, no matter how difficult it may be. And therefore, it is a religious imperative to be willing to be disturbed, as well as rallying to disturb when conscience dictates. Take notice when disturbance bites at your conscience.

Most people I know don’t like mosquitoes, though they may not be as obsessed as I am. Consider your mosquitoes of the spirit, the gadflies that are manifestations of God calling us to respond to disturbing truths. What images are lodged within your psyche? What truths are waiting for you to share, even though they may disturb? Where may God be calling you to put your time and attention?

James Luther Adams is arguably the greatest twentieth century Unitarian Universalist theologian. Writing in 1947, he called for the “prophethood of all believers.” In his words, “The prophetic liberal church is not a church in which the prophetic function is assigned merely to the few. The prophetic liberal church is the church where persons think and work together to interpret the signs of the times in light of their faith… The prophetic liberal church is the church in which all members share the responsibility to attempt to foresee the consequences of human behavior (both individual and institutional) with the intention of making history, in place of merely being pushed around by it. Only through the prophethood of all believers can we together foresee doom and mend our common ways.”

May it be so. Blessed be. Amen.

 

© Copyright 2004 Alan C. Taylor, All Rights Reserved.